It will take a bit of work with a soldering iron but Hack a Day has posted an article covering how to mod one of the GPUs on a GTX690 into thinking it is either a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10. More people will need to apply this mod and test it to confirm that the performance of the GPU actually does match or at least compare to the professional level graphics but the ID string is definitely changed to match one of those two much more expensive GPUs. They also believe that a similar mod could be applied to the new TITAN graphics card as it is electronically similar to the GTX690. Of course, if things go bad during the modification you could kill a $1000 card so do be careful.

"If hardware manufacturers want to keep their firmware crippling a secret, perhaps they shouldn’t mess with Linux users? We figure if you’re using Linux you’re quite a bit more likely than the average Windows user to crack something open and see what’s hidden inside. And so we get to the story of how [Gnif] figured out that the NVIDIA GTX690 can be hacked to perform like the Quadro K5000. The thing is, the latter costs nearly $800 more than the former!"

One of NVIDIA 's line of Tesla HPC cards, the Tesla K10 has actually been seen in the wild. the new Tesla series is split between the GK104 based K10 model specifically designed for single-precision tasks and the GK110 based Tesla K20 and it is optimized for double-precision tasks. The K10 is capable of 4.58 teraflops thanks to a pair of GK104s with 8GB of GDDR5, whereas the K20 should in theory double Intel's Xeon Phi at 2 teraflops of double-precision performance but that has yet to be demonstrated. The K10 that was demonstrated also showed off another of the benefits of NVIDIA's new architecture, even with two GPUs the card remains within a 225W thermal envelop, something that is incredibly important if you are building a cluster. The Register has gathered together some of the benchmarks and slides from NVIDIA's release, which you can see here.

"The Top 500 supercomputer ranking is based on the performance of machines running the Linpack Fortran matrix math benchmark using double-precision floating point math, but a lot of applications will do just fine with single-precision math. And it is for these workloads, graphics chip maker and supercomputing upstart Nvidia says, that it designed the new Tesla K10 server coprocessors."